Report on Juvenile Programs as Presented at a 2004 CLTL Conference
When You Look in My Eyes, What Do You See?
by Taylor Stoehr (profile)

On June 4, 2004, at the Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) conference in Boston, we heard a panel of judges, probation officers, and teachers report on their experiments adapting our alternative sentencing program to juvenile offenders in three different jurisdictions, two in Massachusetts (New Bedford and Dorchester) and one in Kansas (Johnson County). Although based on the same CLTL model - spending probation time in a classroom, reading literature together with representatives of the court - each of these experiments has its own special way of approaching the big question panelists were asked to address:

How can a "literature" program succeed with juveniles who, by the very nature of their cases, are completely absorbed in their own crisis situations, impatient with anything they don't immediately understand - including their own thoughts and feelings! - and who don't trust anything to do with school, especially attempts by teachers to teach them English?

Everyone knows that the exercises and tests of many high school classes are more concerned with memorizing facts than with the human impact of a story. As one of the panelists from Kansas put it, how can we avoid ruining the book for them, the way school so often does?

All of the programs have therefore developed strategies to get around the pitfalls of traditional schooling. For example, only one of the programs assigns any homework: "You can't send books home with them. They lose them - or worse, they often have to hide them from their parents, who don't want them 'wasting time' when they should be working." In many houses, there is no quiet place for a child to read, even if reading were allowed.

So, in the New Bedford program, students read aloud to each other in class, going round the table one by one. They can get through 20 or 30 pages at each session, enough to finish two short books in a course. One advantage is that when they come to some issue they recognize in their own lives, it's easy to stop and talk about it while it's still fresh in everyone's mind.

In the Dorchester program, the teachers bring in poems to read aloud, by Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes. The kids then write their own poems to share with each other, like this excerpt from one ambitious student:

When you look in my eyes
what do you see?
A little tiny baby
trying to walk. Can't you see
she's trying to get up
but keeps falling down?
This is the way my life really is,
now doesn't that make you sad?

When you look into my eyes
what do you see?
A toddler in heels.
Can you walk with these?
They hold me back
and weigh me down,
now doesn't that just make you frown?

After she read this student's poem to us at the conference, Dorchester Juvenile Court Judge Marjory German said, "Every day I see children like her, who are caught in a web not of their own doing, who can't seem to make things work. They do not come onto this earth as criminals. There are no 'bad seeds' at birth. Children are dropped at the Court's doorstep and we are told to 'fix' them. We can't."

All three programs report dropout rates that show how hard it is to connect with these youngsters. In Kansas, they start with ten or twelve students, and may end with only five. In New Bedford, they can go from ten down to six. In Dorchester this spring, they began with eighteen, graduated ten. "With the 30 to 40 cases that come before me," says Judge German, "we don't make a difference every day - or even every week. If once a month, it's a big success. But last Tuesday at our graduation I can name ten children that - maybe - we did make a difference to."

I attended the graduation ceremony where those ten were awarded their diplomas. At the end of the ceremony we heard the poem "When you look into my eyes" read out loud by its author to the courtroom audience of other students, families, probation officers, and teachers. The applause she got probably did more for her future than a year's probation.

This young girl is a potential leader of society. She might be a future judge as well as a poet. No matter how hardened by the street smarts she's learned in order to survive, at this point in her life she is full of utopian ideals and moral indignation. And like every teenager, she's sure she knows what is right and what is wrong. She needs a chance to test her sense of righteousness in a public world that is both challenging and safe.

All our panelists agreed that the most important ingredient in their success recipe is not reading or writing or the self-discipline of coming to class on time every week, however much these may contribute to a teenager's pride and self-confidence. No, the simple but profound secret is that these children need to be taken seriously by adults, and especially by adults who represent authority, like a judge.

At the graduation ceremony in Dorchester, I watched Judge German terminate the young poet's probation, and then, later, while eating a piece of the cake the judge had baked herself (in the shape of a book, with all the students' names inscribed in the frosting), I overheard the following conversation. All the other kids had left, and the cake was mostly gone too, but the young poet was lingering, obviously hungry for something more than cake. She was talking to the judge about self-defense. "When someone insults you or attacks you, you have to fight back. If you turn and run, you'll always be a victim, they'll never stop picking on you." That's the essence of what she was saying. Judge German was arguing with her, saying that sometimes you have to refuse to fight, just walk away. One of the probation officers chimed in - "You'll get in trouble, get arrested."

But the poet was having none of it - "You're older! It was different when you were coming up! You don't know what the streets are like now!" Judge German replied - "You kids always think you're the first ones to experience anything. Don't you think anyone ever tried to beat on us? Kids always think their generation is tougher, has it harder."

But the poet held her ground. And frankly, I don't know who was right. What I do know is that the conversation they were having will be remembered a long time, by all of us - and perhaps we each understand the others a little more because of it.

Let me end by quoting the final stanza of her poem:

Now, when you look into my eyes
What do you see?
A strong black woman,
That's what you see.